


College Crime Stoppers

by mggislife2789



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Acting, Gen, Murder, Murder Mystery, Scooby Doo References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-12-22 07:02:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11962191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mggislife2789/pseuds/mggislife2789
Summary: Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters or their original stories. This is only for fun. It's where my brain goes after the credits roll. No copyright intended. Better safe than sorry. ;)





	College Crime Stoppers

What happened when seven college students with a knack for actually using their brains came together in their off time?

Basically, you got the real-life Sherlock Holmes, Kay Scarpettas, and Hercule Poirots of the world - the wanna-be crime stoppers that were using their wits for something other than law enforcement. 

First, there was David Rossi, age 23, whose parents worked for an engineering firm and had been transferred just before he started college. He’d drifted through school for nearly three and a half years, not knowing what he truly wanted to do, until finally he landed on it. Cooking - it had always been his one true passion. Once he’d finally decided what he wanted to do, he transferred to Le Cordon Bleu’s campus in Vegas and was training under some of the best in the field.

Next was Aaron Hotchner, age 22, who’d grown up doors down from David. Since he was a child, he knew he wanted to be a lawyer. After four grueling years of college, he was returning to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in just a few weeks to begin law school. His father, also a lawyer, was ecstatic, and Mrs. Hotchner could not have been more proud.

Derek Morgan was also 22. From the time he was a child, his father had taught him the value of working with his hands, so it felt truly natural for him to pursue a degree in construction management; it would allow him to continue on the legacy his father had built, Morgan and Hayes Construction, a construction company his father had established with his best friend, Matthew Hayes. Morgan couldn’t deny that in his time of from school his mind tended to wander toward Hayes’ daughter, Savannah.

Emily Prentiss, age 21, was the next oldest in the group of seven. Her mother was an ambassador, so they had moved around for quite a while, but she’d taken a permanent position for her daughter to stay in the same high school. Best friends with JJ and dating Aaron Hotchner, she was pursuing a degree in world languages with a minor in Russian and Spanish, hoping to one day work for the UN.

Then was Penelope Garcia, age 20. On her own for the past two years after her parents tragically passed away in a car crash, she hopped to different friends’ houses and had taught herself coding. She never went to school, but she could probably hack the Pentagon if someone asked her to.

JJ, or Jennifer Jareau, was 19 years old and wanted more than anything to become a nurse, and hopefully work in a neonatal unit of a nearby hospital. She, Penelope and Spencer all lived near each other, and anyone you asked would say the trio was inseparable.

And lastly of course was Spencer Reid, a certified genius with an IQ of 187. He’d already obtained two bachelor’s degrees and was starting a Ph.D. in Engineering at the University of Nevada Las Vegas this year.

Through it all, different schools, different towns, somehow the seven of them had come together. One day about a year earlier, someone had asked them in passing if they’d seen someone pass by with a very particular bike that had been stolen from him. It had irked them so badly, they ended up seeking out the bike stealer and eventually returning the bike to its original owner.

Ever since then, if someone needed help in their local area, they found themselves helping. “You ready to go?” JJ asked Spencer, at the moment reluctantly peeling himself off her couch. The group of them had decided to go to a Halloween-themed Murder Mystery dinner. Spencer was dreading going; he hated big gatherings of any kind, but JJ and Penelope had begged him to go. 

“Yea,” he groaned. 

Within a half hour, all seven college students found themselves sitting at a table enjoying the beginning of a delicious three-course meal. Now was going to be the moment that the lights would go out and a dead body would appear, Spencer thought to himself. It was all so predictable. And as if on cue, the lights went out, came back on two seconds later, and when they returned, he saw the body of a man on the floor.

Everyone playfully screamed, while the already jaded college students giggled at the whole ordeal…until Emily noticed the body seemed to be bleeding. When she approached the body and turned him over, there was a small knife sticking straight out of his heart.

In a panic, everyone actually started screaming. Emily turned toward her friends and boyfriend. Should they help? Could they help? Sure, the police would be there soon, but it would still be a while, and no one could leave until they arrived. “We should help,” she said.

“We found a stolen bike, a missing cat, and stopped a bully,” Spencer whispered hotly. “Murder? How are we supposed to help?”

Emily wanted to help and Aaron wanted to impress her, so that meant he did too. Spencer was too petrified to help, and JJ and Penelope just thought they wouldn’t be able to, while Rossi and Morgan just thought the rest of the group was insane.

While they waited, they observed the panicked patrons around them. The man on the floor had been sitting at a nearby table. Everyone with him looked suspicious now. “Are any of them missing a knife?” Rossi asked.

Spencer huffed. “I would hope no one would be that stupid. None of them are missing one, plus, the handle looked too small, like it was a paring knife or something, not a steak knife.”

“I overheard the man next to the woman in green saying something about his old job. I think he employed the dead man at one point. Maybe he has a connection?”

“Maybe,” JJ interjected. “But the woman is my bet.”

“Why do you say that?” Morgan asked.

She turned back toward the woman, glancing every now and then to gauge her reaction. “Her reaction when everyone else thought it was still the dinner was just a touch too real, and now she is over the top. Of course, you’d expect a woman to be distraught over the loss of her husband,” JJ said, pointing to her ring finger to indicate the woman and man were married, “But she is crying way too hard.”

“So maybe she’s just really distraught,” Morgan said.

Hotch shook his head. “No, JJ’s right. She’d not crying out of sadness. It’s anger.”

“Why anger?” Emily wondered aloud. 

Spencer noticed the woman turning to the others at the table and pointing fingers, both literally and figuratively. “She’s accusing the people she’s with. If she was purely just distraught, she probably wouldn’t be thinking about who did it.”

“So we have a theory that it’s the woman in green, right?” Penelope asked, her blonde curls bouncing up and down as she moved in quickly to whisper to her friends. 

JJ nodded. “Can you hack another person’s phone from your phone?”

“Can I?” Penelope said surprised. “Is there anything yours truly can’t do?”

If she could hack the Pentagon from a laptop in her car, she could get into a couple of cellphones. At the speed of light, her fingers flew across the keyboard, attempting to uncover the dirty little secrets of the inhabitants of the nearby table. 

While Penelope worked her magic with the cellphones, everyone else mingled around the open space, chatting with anyone they could to gain some valuable insight as to who the killer might be. The police arrived shortly after and started taking statements, mostly from tables toward the front, where they and their suspects were not. 

“What have you found?” Hotch asked Penelope as he sidled over to her. 

“What have I not found?” She laughed. “The man next to the woman in green is Michael Dance, a construction engineer who recently fired the dead man, Jacob Brewer. The woman in green is Jacob’s wife, Melanie. Next to Melanie on the other side is her friend, Justine Cramer, who dated Jacob in high school. Next to Justine is her current husband, the second one, whose name is Marcus. The guy next to Marcus? Justine’s first husband, Eric Goldstein. Who knows what the hell is up with that. And the other couple at the table are Tina and Barry Rockingham. They have no connection to anyone at the table.”

“You got all that in ten minutes?” Hotch asked incredulously.

Penelope feigned hurt and grabbed Hotch’s drink, downing it in one gulp. “I am the master,” she smiled. “Now mama’s gonna grab some more of this amazing ice tea while the rest of you do your thing.”

While the police continued to take statements, the rest of the crime-fighting group gathered back at the table save for Emily. “What do we have?” Rossi asked.

“Well, there seemed to be some hostility between Jacob, the dead dude, and his former employer, Michael Dance. Michael had to lay people off recently because of the economy and it didn’t sit well with Jacob,” Morgan said. “But Michael had no ill will toward Jacob, so I don’t know what the motive would be.”

“Justine is just your typical gold-digger,” Spencer said candidly. “She came here with her second husband. She comes every year, so that’s how her first husband ended up here, because he was trying to win her back even though she cleaned him out of half his cash during their divorce.” The rest of the group wondered how he got this information. “It’s a wonder what people say when they’re drunk.”

“True,” Emily said as she approached. “But I think I know who did it…the chef. Well, the guy playing the chef.”

Rossi being the oldest of the group always asked the rest of them for explanations, like he was the boss or something. “How do you know?”

Emily took a deep breath and then went into a full-on speech. “While I was talking to the other couple at the table, who have no connection to the rest of them by the way, I overheard a conversation taking place behind me between the guy playing the chef and the guy playing the butler. The guy playing the butler asked why the other one was so calm, and he responded ‘that condescending fucker had what was coming to him.’ Now that perked my ears up, so I turned around and used my womanly wiles to get them to give me their names. The butler is Brendon Pond and the chef is Joseph Brewer; that’s right, the dead man’s brother.”

Penelope had since returned to the group and again pulled out her phone to dig a little deeper into the lives of Jacob, Joseph and Melanie Brewer. “Okay, since Jacob was laid off, he developed his own construction firm in a neighboring town. He made quite a name for himself and his business seemed to be growing. I have a police report here that says that Joseph, two years younger, was taken into custody after a fight because he needed a job, but his brother wouldn’t give him one. Apparently his younger brother is a screw-up.”

“Well,” JJ said with a smile, “If I know men, and I think I do, Joseph coveted his brother’s entire life, wife included. The two of them started an affair. Jacob, being a construction firm owner, probably has a decent life insurance policy, so with him out of the way, Melanie and Joseph would be well-off and they could be together.

Morgan eyes widened. Spencer pondered why people couldn’t stay faithful. Emily gave JJ a high five and Penelope once again patted herself on the back for a job well done. 

Eventually, the police came to them to give a statement. They’d been asking everyone if they could think of who would’ve done such a thing, so all of them told the police of their suspicions, minus the initial hacking on Penelope’s part of course. 

Once everyone had given a statement, most of them would be free to go, but the young college students actually wanted to stay and see how things played out. It got even more interesting when the police started taking statements from the people at Melanie Brewer’s table. Without bringing the wanna-be crime stoppers into it, they’d brought up a variety of possibilities. “What the hell gave you that idea?” Joseph Brewer boomed. Although he hadn’t meant to, the cop had glanced back toward the group. “You think I’m a killer?”

Emily just laughed, Joseph’s drunken breath nearly knocking her off her feet. “Yea, actually. You have a history of hating your brother. She has a history of cheating. All public record mind you,” she said, turning toward the officer, “Who better to be carrying around that murder weapon than the man playing the chef, and on top of that I believe I see a small speck of blood on that navy blue tie you’re wearing, presumably from when you washed your hands.”

In his supreme inebriation, he didn’t even try to hide it, screaming about how his brother deserved it and bringing Melanie down with him. “She put me up to it! Said we could be together and we’d be rich!”

Ear-piercing screams and flying fists played out in front of them until the cops put them both in handcuffs. They might not have had conclusive proof, but they did have enough to take them in. One of the officers approached the group and thanked them for their time, suggesting they might like law enforcement if they hadn’t picked a major yet before returning to the suspects to bring them to the squad car. 

When they were taken outside, passing the group of college crime stoppers on the way, the brother muttered under his breath. “I could’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids!”


End file.
